D. Alves

A protection system for the JET ITER-like wall based on imaging diagnostics

The new JET ITER-like wall (made of beryllium and tungsten) is more fragile than the former carbon fiber composite wall and requires active protection to prevent excessive heat loads on the plasma facing components (PFC). Analog CCD cameras operating in the near infrared wavelength are used to measure surface temperature of the PFCs. Region of interest (ROI) analysis is performed in real time and the maximum temperature measured in each ROI is sent to the vessel thermal map. The protection of the ITER-like wall system started in October 2011 and has already successfully led to a safe landing of the plasma when hot spots were observed on the Be main chamber PFCs. Divertor protection is more of a challenge due to dust deposits that often generate false hot spots. In this contribution we describe the camera, data capture and real time processing systems. We discuss the calibration strategy for the temperature measurements with cross validation with thermal IR cameras and bi-color pyrometers. Most importantly, we demonstrate that a protection system based on CCD cameras can work and show examples of hot spot detections that stop the plasma pulse. The limits of such a design and the associated constraints on the operations are also presented.

Runaway electron beam generation and mitigation during disruptions at JET-ILW

Disruptions are a major operational concern for next generation tokamaks, including ITER. They may generate excessive heat loads on plasma facing components, large electromagnetic forces in the machine structures and several MA of multi-MeV runaway electrons. A more complete understanding of the runaway generation processes and methods to suppress them is necessary to ensure safe and reliable operation of future tokamaks. Runaway electrons were studied at JET-ILW showing that their generation dependencies (accelerating electric field, avalanche critical field, toroidal field, MHD fluctuations) are in agreement with current theories. In addition, vertical stability plays a key role in long runaway beam formation. Energies up to 20 MeV are observed. Mitigation of an incoming runaway electron beam triggered by massive argon injection was found to be feasible provided that the injection takes place early enough in the disruption process. However, suppressing an already accelerated runaway electron beam in the MA range was found to be difficult even with injections of more than 2 kPa.m3 high-Z gases such as krypton or xenon. This may be due to the presence of a cold background plasma weakly coupled to the runaway electron beam which prevents neutrals from penetrating in the electron beam core. Following unsuccessful mitigation attempts, runaway electron impacts on beryllium plasma-facing components were observed, showing localized melting with toroidal asymmetries.

Implementation of the Disruption Predictor APODIS in JET’s Real-Time Network Using the MARTe Framework

This paper describes the implementation of a real-time disruption predictor that is based on support vector machine (SVM) classifiers. The implementation was performed under the MARTe framework on a six-core x86 architecture. The system is connected via JETs Real-time Data Network (RTDN). The online results show a high degree of successful predictions and a low rate of false alarms, thus confirming the usefulness of this approach in a disruption mitigation scheme. The implementation shows a low computational load, which will be exploited in the immediate future to increase the predictions temporal resolution.

Engineering design of ITER prototype Fast Plant System Controller

The ITER control, data access and communication (CODAC) design team identified the need for two types of plant systems. A slow control plant system is based on industrial automation technology with maximum sampling rates below 100 Hz, and a fast control plant system is based on embedded technology with higher sampling rates and more stringent real-time requirements than that required for slow controllers. The latter is applicable to diagnostics and plant systems in closed-control loops whose cycle times are below 1 ms. Fast controllers will be dedicated industrial controllers with the ability to supervise other fast and/or slow controllers, interface to actuators and sensors and, if necessary, high performance networks. Two prototypes of a fast plant system controller specialized for data acquisition and constrained by ITER technological choices are being built using two different form factors. This prototyping activity contributes to the Plant Control Design Handbook effort of standardization, specifically regarding fast controller characteristics. Envisaging a general purpose fast controller design, diagnostic use cases with specific requirements were analyzed and will be presented along with the interface with CODAC and sensors. The requirements and constraints that real-time plasma control imposes on the design were also taken into consideration. Functional specifications and technology neutral architecture, together with its implications on the engineering design, were considered. The detailed engineering design compliant with ITER standards was performed and will be discussed in detail. Emphasis will be given to the integration of the controller in the standard CODAC environment. Requirements for the EPICS IOC providing the interface to the outside world, the prototype decisions on form factor, real-time operating system, and high-performance networks will also be discussed, as well as the requirements for data streaming to CODAC for visualization and archiving.

A real-time architecture for the identification of faulty magnetic sensors in the JET tokamak

In a tokamak, the accurate estimation of the plasma boundary is essential to maximise the fusion performance and is also the first line of defence for the physical integrity of the device. In particular, the first wall components might get severely damaged if over-exposed to a high plasma thermal load. The most common approach to calculate the plasma geometry and related parameters is based in a large set of different types of magnetic sensors. Using this information, real-time plasma equilibrium codes infer a flux map and calculate the shape and geometry of the plasma boundary and its distance to a known reference (e.g. first wall). These are inputs to one or more controllers capable of acting on the shape and trajectory based in pre-defined requests. Depending on the device, the error of the estimated boundary distance must usually be less than 1 centimetre, which translates into very small errors on the magnetic measurement itself. Moreover, asymmetries in the plasma generated and surrounding magnetic fields can produce local shape deformations potentially leading to an unstable control of the plasma geometry. The JET tokamak was recently upgraded to a new and less thermally robust all-metal wall, also known as the ITER-like wall. Currently the shape controller system uses the output of a single reconstruction algorithm to drive the plasma geometry and the protection systems have no input from the plasma boundary reconstruction. These choices are historical and were due to architectural, hardware and processing power limitations. Taking advantage of new multi-core systems and of the already proved robustness of the JET real-time network, this paper proposes a distributed architecture for the real-time identification of faults in the magnetic measurements of the JET tokamak. Besides detecting simple faults, such as short-circuits and open-loops, the system compares the expected measurement at the coil location and the real measurement, producing a confidence value. Several magnetic reconstructions, using sensors from multiple toroidally distributed locations, can run in parallel, allowing for a voting or averaging scheme selection. Finally, any fault warnings can be directly fed to the real-time protection sequencer system, whose main function is to coordinate the protection of the JETs first wall.

Plasma isotopic changeover experiments in JET under carbon and ITER-like wall conditions

In JET-ILW isotopic plasma wall changeover experiments have been carried out to determine the amount of particles accessible by changing the plasma from H to D and from D to H. The gas balance analysis integrated over the experimental sessions show that the total amount of H or D removed from the wall is in the range of (1–3) × 1022D. For both changeover experiments, the respective plasma isotopic ratio behaviour is exactly the same as a function of the pulse number. After only 80 s of plasma (4 pulses), the plasma isotopic ratio is lower than 10%, below 4.5% after 13 pulses and then saturates around ~2–3%. In these conditions, the removal efficiency through plasma operation becomes very poor. The saturation of the plasma isotopic ratio in the range of 10% is also observed for the JET-C configuration although the amount of tritium retained in the vessel after the DT pulses was more than one order of magnitude compared to the retention observed with the JET-ILW. This demonstrates that the amount of particle recovery through plasma changeover is independent from the long term retention. Since this long term reservoir results from codeposition, these experiments suggest that there is a limited access to these codeposited particles by plasma isotopic changeover. Finally, in ITER, change over from D/T to H at the end of the discharge for possibly reducing the long term retention does not appear as a good strategy.

A real-time algorithm for the harmonic estimation and frequency tracking of dominant components in fusion plasma magnetic diagnostics

The real-time tracking of instantaneous quantities such as frequency, amplitude, and phase of components immerse in noisy signals has been a common problem in many scientific and engineering fields such as power systems and delivery, telecommunications, and acoustics for the past decades. In magnetically confined fusion research, extracting this sort of information from magnetic signals can be of valuable assistance in, for instance, feedback control of detrimental magnetohydrodynamic modes and disruption avoidance mechanisms by monitoring instability growth or anticipating mode-locking events. This work is focused on nonlinear Kalman filter based methods for tackling this problem. Similar methods have already proven their merits and have been successfully employed in this scientific domain in applications such as amplitude demodulation for the motional Stark effect diagnostic. In the course of this work, three approaches are described, compared, and discussed using magnetic signals from the Joint European Torus tokamak plasma discharges for benchmarking purposes.

ITER prototype fast plant system controller based on ATCA platform

The ITER Fast Plant System Controllers (FPSC) are based on embedded technologies and will be devoted to both data acquisition tasks (sampling rates >1 kSPS) and control purposes in closed-control loops whose cycle times are below 1 ms. Fast Controllers will be dedicated industrial controllers with the ability to: i) supervise other fast and/or slow controllers; ii) interface to actuators and sensors and high performance networks. This contribution presents an FPSC prototype, specialized for data acquisition, based on the ATCA (Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture) standard. This prototyping activity contributes to the ITER Plant Control Design Handbook (PCDH) effort of standardization, specifically regarding fast controller characteristics. For the prototype, IPFN is developing a new family of ATCA modules targeting ITER requirements. The modules comprise an AMC carrier/data hub/timing hub compliant with the upcoming ATCA extensions for Physics and a multi-channel with galvanic isolation hot-swappable digitizer designed for serviceability. The design and test of a peer-to-peer communications layer for the implementation of a reflective memory over PCI Express and the design and test of an IEEE-1588 transport layer over a high performance serial link was also performed. In this work, a complete description of the solution is presented as well as the integration of the controller into the standard CODAC environment. The most relevant results of real tests will be addressed, focusing in the benefits and limitations of the applied technologies.

A Flexible System for the Control of External Magnetic Perturbations in the JET Tokamak

External magnetic perturbations are typically utilized in tokamak devices with two operational or experimental purposes: 1) correction of intrinsic 3-D error fields and 2) mitigation or suppression of edge localized modes (ELMs). At Joint European Torus (JET), dedicated coils are used for the generation of these toroidally asymmetric perturbations. While error fields exist even in the absence of plasma, in ELM mitigation experiments, the external fields are meant to slightly ergodize the magnetic topology in the plasma periphery hence reducing the drive for the destabilization of these instabilities. The control of the magnetic field produced by these coils is achieved by controlling the current flowing in them. The real-time system responsible for this control recently underwent a number of functional improvements since its original implementation utilizing the present voltage-controlled voltage sources. This paper describes the overall system, built-in functionality, and control algorithms and presents preliminary experimental results along with performance assessment studies. In particular, the main improvements are: 1) the possibility of automatically reducing the current references in case the plasma amplifies the applied perturbation; 2) a real-time limitation of dI/dt to reduce the electromotive force in machine protection diagnostic systems; 3) implementation of a model predictive controller as an alternative to the proportional integral derivative; and 4) the possibility of adapting the current references, in real time, using an external system. The result is a flexible control system contributing toward state-of-the-art physics research at JETs international and dynamic scientific environment.

MHD marking using the MSE polarimeter optics in ILW JET plasmas

In this communication we propose a novel diagnostic technique, which uses the collection optics of the JET Motional Stark Effect (MSE) diagnostic, to perform polarimetry marking of observed MHD in high temperature plasma regimes. To introduce the technique, first we will present measurements of the coherence between MSE polarimeter, electron cyclotron emission, and Mirnov coil signals aiming to show the feasibility of the method. The next step consists of measuring the amplitude fluctuation of the raw MSE polarimeter signals, for each MSE channel, following carefully the MHD frequency on Mirnov coil data spectrograms. A variety of experimental examples in JET ITER-Like Wall (ILW) plasmas are presented, providing an adequate picture and interpretation for the MSE optics polarimeter technique.